Saturday, June 22, 2013

Oceans and oceans of bicycles in Amsterdam

While cities like New York struggle to get people onto bikes,
Amsterdam is trying to keep its hordes of bikes under control. In a
city of 800,000, there are 880,000 bicycles, the government estimates,
four times the number of cars. In the past two decades, travel by bike
has grown by 40 percent so that now about 32 percent of all trips within
the city are by bike, compared with 22 percent by car.

Applauding this accomplishment, a Danish urban planning consultancy, Copenhagenize Design, which publishes an annual list of the 20 most bike-friendly cities,
placed Amsterdam in first place this year, as it has frequently in the
past. (The list consists mostly of European cities, though Tokyo;
Nagoya, Japan; and Rio de Janeiro made the cut. Montreal is the only
North American city included.)

But many Amsterdamers say it is not so much the traffic jams like those
at the morning ferry that annoy them most, but the problem of where to
park their bikes once they get to where they’re going, in a city with
almost more water than paved surfaces. Read on in the NYT here. To tackle this problem Velo Mondial has designed a Low Lijn: Lounge & Bicycle Garden that the city debates now.